Brando (43 page)

Several months later, when I was making
Last Tango in Paris
, Diana came to the set with a camera. She was now a photographer, trying on a new career. I said I was glad to see her and gave her a kiss. We were filming a scene at the time, so I suggested that we have dinner that night. We did, and had some laughs and talked about old times. Then we walked to the apartment where I was staying; she came upstairs and took off her clothes, but I went to sleep. I didn’t feel anything for her. A few months later, Diana was back in California and called to say that she had a pain in her back and wanted a massage. She came over and took her clothes off, and I gave her a full massage, then fell asleep again. I didn’t even think about making love to her. Once she had left me, I had no feelings left for her.

   That Beverly Hills psychiatrist had no real insight about people, though it cost me a substantial amount of money to learn this. Back then, I was overly impressed with sheepskins. It took
me a long time to realize that just because someone went to medical school and papered his walls with diplomas, it didn’t mean he was a good analyst. It requires a rare and special talent to understand people, and it is hard to find.

A couple of years later I met G. L. Harrington, a wonderful and insightful man who, sadly, is now dead, a victim of liver cancer. It is a disease that usually kills within months but he battled it for five years before it took him. He was crippled in body but not in mind. His hip and one leg had been smashed in a car accident, and because he refused to let doctors amputate the leg, it was two or three inches shorter than the other one. It gave him a lot of pain, but he never complained. He was a handsome, rugged man with a low husky rumble for a voice and a lot of male hormones. In some ways he reminded me of my father. He was the kind of man I thought I would never like. I had always bridled in the presence of masculine men like him and frequently got into fights with them. I felt I had to be aggressive with men like him, that I had to defeat them. Harrington was such a man. He had been a pilot during the war, and to judge by the medals and decorations on his wall, a brave one. But while he had a masculine aura, he was also one of the funniest, wittiest, most creative, sensitive and insightful people I’d ever met. After spending years on couches, I was familiar with analysis when I first went to see him. Whenever I started therapy with a new doctor, I always tried to give him a list of my neurotic dysfunctions, which was what most of them wanted to hear. After a grace period, I decided it was time to give my list to Harrington. My wheelbarrow full of analytic misinformation, I wheeled it up to his door and said, “I want to get into some of the things that happened to me in the past.”

“Oh, we’ll get to them when the time comes,” Harrington said, but we never did; he talked and laughed me out of it. We would discuss anything because he had great curiosity: electricity, airplanes, genetics, evolution, politics, botany and every
other subject under the sun. I saw him once a week and always looked forward to it because he made me laugh at myself. Once I told him I had always been fascinated by writers like Kant and Rousseau, and that I gravitated to women with similar tastes, those with whom I had something in common.

With a straight face, Harrington said, “Tell me about this Japanese girl you’ve been seeing …” It was his way of telling me that what I had just said was idiotic: you’ve got a girlfriend who can’t speak English, you have nothing in common with her, and yet you chose her.

Once I told Harrington, “I think I’ve got a lot of rage because of my father.”

“What do you mean ‘rage’? Because you’re mad at your father?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you’re not mad now, are you?”

“Well, not right this minute.”

He said, “Okay,” and that was it, but for some reason it helped disarm my anger.

Another day I walked into his studio, a small room with a desk, table and two chairs, and sat down, and as usual he gave me a cup of coffee. Every morning his wife put a fresh rose on his desk, and on this day I noticed that it was magnificent. Two petals had fallen off and were lying next to it on the desk. I was entranced by it and said, “That’s the most beautiful rose I’ve ever seen.” Then I leaned over to smell it and said, “But it doesn’t smell.”

“I’d be alarmed if it did,” he said.

“Why?”

“Because it’s a fake.”

He had put the two petals beside the artificial rose to convey the illusion of reality and to illustrate that everything in life was perception—that just because you assume something is true, it ain’t necessarily so.

My sister Jocelyn also went to Harrington, and the two of us spent a lot of time on the phone comparing notes about our sessions with him. She loved him deeply because he was the father she never had. His wife was also very kind. She was a former concert pianist who sometimes played Rachmaninoff in an adjoining room during our sessions.

Once Dr. Harrington told me about a patient who came to see him; after ten or twelve minutes she stood up, said, “I’ve learned what I wanted to know, and I want to thank you very much,” and then walked out the door. I always remembered this story, and once I asked him, “Why do we always have to talk for an hour? Sometimes I don’t want to talk for more than twenty minutes.” He agreed, and unless it was an important session that might go on for two hours, I’d get up and leave regardless of the time. One day after about three years I got up and said, “I don’t know whether I have to come back here anymore. I’d like to come back and talk to you, but I don’t think I
need
to.”

And that was the end of my therapy. I never went back, but I was a different person for having known him. He was a wonderful friend who helped others in my family, too, and through humor he taught me a lot about myself. He simply had a talent for it. Most of all, G. L. Harrington taught me how to forgive—myself and others.

I SUSPECT SOME READERS
who have reached this point in the book are asking themselves, “When’s Brando going to talk about the Indians? Isn’t he
obsessed
with the plight of the American Indian?” I bridle at this, more in exasperation than in anger, because I’m confronted with it over and over again from people who, perhaps to please me, mention “the plight of the American Indian” as if it were something that had happened on another planet in another era—like a drought in equatorial Africa or the Black Death in fourteenth-century Europe, as if the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent people were some sort of a historical curiosity, even an act of God, that humankind had nothing to do with and bore no responsibility for. This grates on my soul.

What astonishes me is how ignorant most Americans are about the Indians and how little sympathy and understanding there is for them. It puzzles me that most people don’t take seriously the fact that this country was stolen from the Native Americans, and that millions of them were killed in the process. It has been swept from the national consciousness as if it never occurred—or if it did, it was a noble act in the name of God, civilization and progress. The number of Indians who died
because of what we called Manifest Destiny has always been a subject of debate among scholars, but I believe that the majority of informed historians and anthropologists now agree that between seven million and eighteen million indigenous people were living in what is today the continental United States when Columbus arrived in the New World. By 1924 there were fewer than 240,000 left; their ancestors had been victimized by centuries of disease, starvation and systematic slaughter.

If people acknowledged a similar ignorance about the Holocaust, they would be regarded with amazement. But that’s how it is for most of us when it comes to Native Americans. To my mind the killing of Indians was an even larger crime against humanity than the Holocaust: not only did it take more lives, but it was a crime committed over centuries that continues in some ways to this day.

Ever since I helped raise funds for Israel as a young man and learned about the Holocaust, I’ve been interested in how different societies treat one another; it is one of the enduring interests of my life. In the early sixties I read a book by John Collier, a former U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs who was responsible for giving the Indians a token measure of self-government on their reservations during the 1930s, and I was shocked at how badly we had treated them. Then I read
The First Americans
by a Flathead Indian, anthropologist D’Arcy McNickle, and was moved. The book describes two hundred years of savage warfare by European settlers against the Indians, the massacres of native peoples from New England to California and how U.S. military leaders like Lieutenant General Phil Sheridan called for the outright annihilation of the race. Indians who escaped being cut down by such predators were killed by disease imported by European settlers, which was followed by forced marches, deliberate starvation and attempts to destroy their culture.

The book was an eye-opener, and I went to Santa Fe to visit
D’Arcy McNickle. After we had talked for several hours, I asked him where I could meet some Indians, and he suggested that I get in touch with the National Indian Youth Council. I went to a meeting of the organization and made many friends, a lot of whom I still know today, and thereafter I became absorbed with the world of the Native American.

In the early 1960s, several members of the Indian Youth Council from the Pacific Northwest told me that they had decided to challenge government limits on salmon fishing by Indians in western Washington and along the Columbia River. Century-old treaties guaranteed their tribes the right to fish at their accustomed places in perpetuity—“as long as the mountains stand, the grass grows and the sun shines.” But sport and commercial salmon fishermen had persuaded state and federal agencies to limit their harvest, blaming the Indians for a drop in their own catch. This was after decades in which white people had built a string of dams on the rivers, often making it impossible for salmon to spawn, and after lumber companies had polluted streams and rivers with toxic chemicals and other garbage. The Indians wanted to challenge the restrictions because they clearly violated their legal rights to fish in the streams, and I offered to join them in doing so on the Puyallup Indian Reservation in Washington, with the expectation of being arrested and publicizing the “fish-in.” I got in a boat with a Native American and a Catholic priest; someone gave us a big salmon we were supposed to have taken out of the river illegally and, sure enough, a game warden soon arrived and arrested us. He took us to a jail near Olympia, but I was released after an hour and half because, I was told, the governor didn’t want a movie star’s arrest to create more publicity for the Indians’ campaign.

Even though I couldn’t get arrested for long, my experiences with the Native Americans had given me a sense of brotherhood with them that has lasted to this day. I was introduced to Indian food, Indian humor, Indian religion and the Sun Dance, an intense spiritual experience that the federal government had banned as part of its campaign to break the spirit and cohesiveness of Native Americans until they demanded and won the right to perform it again in the 1960s. One reason I liked being with the Indians was that they didn’t give anyone movie-star treatment. They didn’t give a damn about my movies. Everyone’s the same; everyone shares and shares alike. Indians are usually depicted as grumpy people with monochrome moods, but I learned that they have a sardonic sense of humor and that they love to tease. They laugh at anything, especially themselves. If somebody stutters, everybody in the group stutters or pretends to go to sleep while the poor man tries to finish a sentence. But it’s an honest humor, not cruel.

There is no doubt that alcohol is the bane of the American Indians; many of them have drinking problems, and a bottle was usually on the table whenever we sat down. I also learned that there’s real time and Indian time: if a meeting is supposed to start at nine
P.M.
Indians start dribbling in about ten
P.M.

After my first attempt at being arrested failed, we set out again, this time near a different reservation in Washington. We spent the night before in an unheated cabin with paper-thin walls, and I came down with a chest cold to end all chest colds. A damp wind blowing through cracks in the walls all night didn’t help.

At dawn, when it was time to leave, I was coughing and hacking and had a high temperature. But the Indians looked at me expectantly, and I knew I had to go. I wrapped myself in a blanket and got in the boat while icy waves whipped up by the wind sprayed everyone, and as we left shore I thought, I’m not going to leave this boat alive. I suspected that I had pneumonia, that I was going to die and that my body would be dumped into the river. Hunched over, I told one of my Indian friends, Hank Adams, how awful I felt, and he said, “You know, my grandmother used to say, ‘If you smile, you’ll feel better.’ ”

I just looked at him and thought, What in this poor, pissed-on world are you talking about? I’m dying, and you’re asking me to smile?